Will Scott Morrison make it to May and become Australia’s 12th longest-serving PM?
Scott Morrison needs to stay in office until May 23 to become Australia’s 12th longest-serving PM, but there’s no guarantee he will even make it to the election.
Analysis
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Lucky for some, unlucky for others.
Scott Morrison is currently Australia’s 13th longest serving prime minister. He needs to stay in office until May 23 to pass Labor – and indeed Australian – hero, our war-time PM John Curtin, and so move into the top dozen.
That date is extraordinarily exquisite; it plays into both the timing of the election – something, that is entirely, at least for now, in the ‘gift’ of Morrison himself – and the dynamics of the election campaign.
The PM and the PM alone – even in a 1975 context – decides the specific date of the election, if not the having of one. May 23 is even more exquisitely a Monday. Call the election for May 21, and if that ‘second miracle’ doesn’t turn up, Morrison will fall one day short of equalling Curtin.
He will remain forever, or certainly for a very long time – does anyone seriously see Anthony Albanese winning two elections in a row? – locked in the miracle-free or just plain luckless 13th.
Call it for May 28 and he’s home and hosed, at least in the rankings. That’s, if.
That’s if, he actually makes it to the election as Liberal and Coalition leader and so PM. You would normally think it completely unthinkable that Morrison could be replaced this close to the election. I heard one of the top members of the Canberra Press Gallery say exactly that on radio Monday; and I have not heard any whisperings of a challenge.
But after Morrison’s totally self-inflicted ‘horror week’ – very critically, in both the context of the disastrous opinion polls and Barnaby Joyce as an (disastrous) event all on his own – the unthinkable is very thinkable.
I would also remind people of 2013. Faced with looming electoral disaster, Labor went back to Kevin Rudd. They did so, just 82 days out from the election; we still have 103 days to a May 21 election, 96 days to a May 14 one. Now in 2013, Labor still went down in a near-landslide; but it is generally argued that the “people’s psychopath”, Rudd, saved maybe 10-12 seats. Who knows, but for Rudd’s return, Tony Abbott might be PM still and we all might have been saved from Malcolm Turnbull.
Oh, did I mention, in another echo of today’s events, the character description ‘psychopath’ was also freely tossed around about Rudd.
That “people’s psychopath” was a newspaper headline. Kristina Keneally for one – former NSW premier and budding Albanese government minister – described Rudd as a “psychopathic narcissist”.
Unlike our current unnamed messenger in relation Morrison, much if not most of it was on the public record. Two very substantive things flow out of these musings.
If Morrison was to go – he would have to be pushed, I don’t see him doing a Captain Oates – who would replace him?
There are two choices: Treasurer and Liberal number two Josh Frydenberg and Peter Dutton. Interestingly and tellingly, both are at very real risk of losing their own seats, John Howard 2007-style – in the landslide predicted by the current polls. Secondly, either way – Morrison stays or is turfed - there is a serious risk of an over-long election campaign.
The budget, brought forward to the end of March cannot but be the Government’s election manifesto.
When we wake up on Wednesday March 30, we will be in the campaign.
That really should mean – if the PM (whomever) was half-smart - an election on May 7; May 14 at the absolute latest.
In 2016 Turnbull – and his Treasurer Morrison - launched the election off a ‘hit-their-own base’ budget and all-but disastrously had an eight week campaign. They managed to destroy Abbott’s thumping majority.
The Liberals – and their PM, whomever it turns out to be – have some serious thinking to do.
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